


a dream about yearning told in two different ways

by unlitmajor (sebbie)



Series: dreams i might turn into stories [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Experimental Style, F/F, Gen, Romance, Self-Indulgent, dream - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27630935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sebbie/pseuds/unlitmajor
Summary: a dream about yearning and fleeting things
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Series: dreams i might turn into stories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2020250





	1. the dream

When the dream begins, I am a child.

Or, rather _the_ Child of someone great,

renowned and respected.

A distant figure, a shadow I can never escape,

my mother in name only.

Though she is gone now,

well and truly,

she remains a haunting presence.

She is a stranger to me.

Still, I know that I am mourning—for her,

for time she never spent with me,

for the tenderness and affection

I craved but never got.

The Mother, she had a child and a husband.

But she loved her work more than them.

She is cold and distant.

She is Power manifest, and Love rarely given.

There is always a yearning for the mother,

for her embrace and her acknowledgement.

But mother is gone,

my longing and my bitterness

will never reach her.

I dream that I am with my father,

and we are tracing a path back to the past.

It’s a series of montages,

visiting places they’d seen together,

places they’d loved and laughed and been.

But I, the Child, cannot feel a connection to those places.

I am empty while my father mourns.

To me, the places are just places,

the sunsets are just sunsets,

mere sceneries that cannot touch me

with their hidden meanings.

I leave Father. He disappears

(from the dream). Entirely.

I walk and walk and walk

until I come to a place where I meet Her.

The Woman is older than I am,

but young in a way that shows

she has not quite reached

that distant hollowness

of the Mother,

her air of prestige

that made her

untouchable.

The Woman tells me they were friends,

_I was her colleague._

Her subordinate,

I think, biting down my words.

I mean to sneer,

but I hold myself still instead.

I may be her Child

but this woman was a part of mother’s Life.

She holds a more significant

sense of familiarity with the Mother.

Yet, like me,

the Woman craves and yearns for her.

Her desire is different from mine,

filled with heat and pride and wanting.

The Woman wants the Doctor’s attention—

her love and her respect.

I learn that the Doctor-Mother

did give her attention,

loved her with hands and mouth,

and respected her in a way only a Goddess could

do her most loyal worshipper (and nothing more).

When the Woman meets the lost Child,

she is on a path to becoming like the Mother—

a newly minted doctor,

yet already renowned and esteemed by her community—

the acolyte who became divine after her goddess forsook her.

We meet.

The desire of the Child is to know the Mother

through the Woman.

But the Child is also a woman

(a Woman who desires her own Doctor).

Wanting and yearning reprised,

the tune broken and twisted.

And, thus, the Woman loves me

with her hands and mouth.

In quiet moments she tells me

about the Mother, her Doctor.

And then she dotes on me again

like a Goddess to a weary traveler

who brought her a multitude of offerings

that flattered and amused her.

The Woman wants me for my blood,

(uses me for my flesh) wants me

for my being, my _connection_ to my mother.

She desire’s my Mother’s counsel,

her guidance, her brilliance—

all of which I do not possess

(all of which the Mother never gave me).

So, the Woman yearns for her Doctor through me,

and I yearn for the Mother through her.

The connection between us is an illusion.

I leave the Woman like I leave my Father.

She watches me leave the way the Doctor-Mother left her.

The Woman-Doctor weaves the allure of brilliance into her skin.

The Child-who-is-Woman remains wandering.

She is distant and cold and hollow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dreamt: 22 April 2020 5:40 AM  
> Edited: 24 October 2020 8:58 PM


	2. prose

_The plot, in other words_

Flowery, “poetic” writing aside. I think the basic premise of the dream is this: My dream persona is a young adult whose mother disappears. Nobody knows what actually happened—not her reasons nor the circumstances that led to it.

She’s a renowned intellectual at the top of her game, and she _just_ vanishes, suddenly and with neither warning nor clue. The persona’s father is more or less estranged from her because (1) he’s always loved his wife more than he’s ever loved his daughter, and (2) she left the house when she was old enough to do so (she couldn’t find the love and attention she craved from her mother, and eventually she realized it was pointless to wait for her father to give it; so she chose to seek it elsewhere).

The trauma, as it were, that came from the mother’s lack of love is also exacerbated by how pervasive her presence and how far-reaching her influence was (on top of that, her sensational disappearance). For the persona, she’s always looming. She can’t quite escape the shadow cast by her mother’s brilliance.

You can see this in all her interactions with the other “characters.”

The persona’s father reached out to her because he had no one else. Unspoken, though, is this belief of the father that the persona is the last of his wife left (a flesh-and-blood legacy “untouched” by/unrelated to the work she did that pulled her away from him—but he is wrong because her loneliness is a manifestation of mother’s love for her work).

She spends time with her father on a road trip as he recounts the story of their youth—where they met, the places they visited, where they got married. Eventually, the persona leaves him (the last of the father’s destination was home—“the house of her childhood” but she elected not to return because, like the other places they visited, “that place was empty”).

It’s after the road trip that she meets her mother’s colleague. Although they’re peers in the same field, the colleague used to be the mother’s intern.

Even when she was still a student, she’d always admired the persona’s mother—perhaps it was an unsurprising development that her professional admiration turned into something more akin to infatuation and lust.

The colleague and the mother got entangled in a brief relationship, which had meant the world to her but a mere distraction for the mother. Whether the persona’s father had been aware of the affair is unknown since she hears about it for the first time from the colleague.

The persona tries to look for traces of the mother in her former paramour, this stranger she can learn anew, fierce and yielding beneath her hands.

But, in the end, she doesn’t find what she’s looking for.

Despite what the young doctor thinks, she doesn’t know the mother as well as she thought (as well as she wished) she did.

After all, she was also using the persona, trying to find a spark of the Doctor-Mother’s brilliance in her daughter and finding nothing but shadows.

They were both yearning for the same person, in their own ways, through each other. Eventually, they realized their feelings for each other can never run any deeper than pretense and infatuation.

The young doctor is more silent about this realization, unwilling to let go of this woman who looked so much like the person she idolized and adored, and could never have.

The irony is that, for all her mother could never give her, (or rather precisely for that reason) the persona did learn how to affect her mother’s aloofness. If nothing else, the persona found cutting ties easier than making them (no matter how desperately she craved being grounded in warmth and being rooted in love).

So, the persona leaves before her doctor could push her away.

In essence, the whole dream is about a woman who seemed to love her work more than anything else in life, who disappeared suddenly while she was in her [career’s] prime. The dream-sequence just shows the kind of shit she wrought over the people in her life, the kind of desperate hunger and needy manipulation her unhealthy focus on her work begun and perpetuated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Conversation Start: 22 April 2020 11:20 AM  
> Conversation End: 22 April 2020 11:39 AM

**Author's Note:**

> Edited: 06 November 2020 12:23 PM


End file.
